Microsoft says that a group of Garage interns were tasked by the AI for Earth team to utilize the power of AI and aerial images in a project. The result of their endeavors is Xamarin-based Earth Lens, which detects, analyzes, and tracks specific objects in aerial imagery. According to the company, this will facilitate in numerous critical scenarios such as disaster relief.

Michelle Chen, Program Manager intern for Earth Lens, says that:

Equipped with a trained machine learning model from the AI for Earth team, the interns set out to build a minimally viable product over the course of their remaining 16-week internship. They approached design with a customer obsessed mindset and interviewed prospective users like to the Red Cross, OceanMind, and FarmBeats to identify useful features and iterate on their prototype. The team quickly realized that, in addition to disaster relief, such a tool might be useful in a variety of social impact and sustainability applications such as agriculture, forestry, fishing, and land conservation.